I’m sorry, but unless it’s a Steven Hawking-level prompt, it’s quite challenging for me to truly consider the result “art.” Sorry, let me amend that-- unless it’s barely 1% of what Hawking might have come up with for a prompt, which would quite possibly have still been WAY more interesting than whatever the AI models pumped out. Heh.

Agreed, I would even go as far as saying that writing a prompt can not be art, no matter how well written. I tend to think so, because the process of AI image generation is so complex, that while it is not actually random, in practice the process is a black box to the person writing the prompt. That makes the process virtually non-deterministic from the prompt-writers perspective. Thus writing a prompt is closer to guessing around and choosing the best of the random results, then to actually creating something, based on ones own creative vision. If at all the results are created based on the creative vision of the artists the AI was trained on and in the process those artists visions have been put into a blender and mixed into a non recognizable pulp.

Well for me, the trained art of the original artists exist on a plateau high… high above the coding gurus. Further down, in the smelly muck, exist the wretched prompt-generators. It’s almost like a scenario from Dante’s Inferno, lol.

I could not have said it better but I am also sure in the future, people who do nothing more than writing prompts, will start labeling themselves “prompt artists”. However, what I could actually respect as a form of art, would be a person or collective, which develops their own AI, codes it by themselves, then personally chooses certain material to train the AI on (with consent of the creators instead of just auto crawling the web for random images) and then writes prompts for it. Compared to just prompt writing, this method would require serious effort in what I would call proper craftsmanship and even more important, the process would become more deterministic, so the results would be significantly based on the prompt writers creative vision instead of a seemingly random process.

That said-- I feel like the writing is on the dang’ol wall. I.e., my view is becoming antiquated, and the younger gen and new AI are increasingly tossing the views of us ‘old fuddy-duddies’ out to the curb. :-(

I am not worried about that, just think of music made with acoustic instruments, vinyl records, analog tube guitar amplifiers and so on. The good stuff usually stays around no matter what new stuff gets invented, sure a technology might lose it’s cultural dominance but will stay state of the art for the connoisseurs and often some time after that, when people get tired with the new stuff, it even has a mainstream revival.

Edit: There is already a counter movement, check this out: This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI